TONK!://ABOUT
About
The Great Silence
Somewhere, a small planet has gone quiet. Not completely quiet. Worse: it lost its tiny sounds. The clicks, hums, taps, squeaks, breaths, buzzes, room tones, broken rhythms, and almost-nothings. Tonk! is an archive for bringing them back. A place for chosen listeners, accidental field agents, and tiny sound rescuers to refill the archive before the small noises disappear for good. Record what the world still makes. Design what the world might sound like. Draw what it looks like. Reply with sound. Stack what might open a path. One day, the strangest finds may be played at the Tonk! Sound Festival.
The archive remembers 18 tiny sounds.
Random drawings
A tiny visual detour through sounds people heard with their hands.
Loading drawings...
What changed recently
2026-05-08
Added the Great Silence lore: Tonk! is now framed as a tiny sound archive for restoring lost clicks, hums, taps, squeaks, and almost-nothings.
2026-05-08
Added Archive Receipts after posting, with a small ritual thank-you and buttons to view the restored sound or return to the feed.
2026-05-08
Added archive status copy in the feed and About page, showing how many tiny sounds the archive currently remembers.
2026-05-08
Added optional sound missions with a curated mission pool, mission badges, mission pages, and a two-second limit for the Two clicks mission.
2026-05-08
Updated onboarding with the tiny sound collector wording: Listen closely. Help refill the archive.
2026-05-08
Added sound replies: people can now answer a sound with another sound, shown as a simple one-level reply tree under the original post.
2026-05-08
Added optional reply notes, so a sound response can include a small bit of context like what was found, matched, or answered.
2026-05-08
Parked the one-word reaction feature for now and cleaned up the sound cards so replies, drawings, saving, sharing, and downloads stay more focused.
2026-05-06
Polished comments with a grey diagonal dither texture, sharper Tonk!-style buttons, heart reactions on comments, and a collapsed drawing board so drawings are visible first.
2026-05-06
Added Drawings and People galleries, plus small discovery banners inside the feed so people can find visual sound drawings, profile sketches, Stack Mode, and the weekly quest while scrolling.
2026-05-06
Updated the weekly quest to feel more central: bigger banner typography, clearer action buttons, response links, and the new prompt “the sound of waiting”.
2026-05-05
Improved tagging with sensory and emotional tag suggestions, clickable tag filters, and better tag visibility across upload, feed, stack mode, details, and profiles.
2026-05-05
Added stack mode filters, so random trios can be shaped by length, source type, search, and tags.
2026-05-05
Tested a cleaner audio player with a playhead and a side meter on feed cards.
2026-05-04
Added a license notice before downloads, so usage rights are clearer.
2026-05-04
Added share links for individual sounds.
2026-05-04
Added file uploads again, alongside live microphone recording.
2026-05-04
Added Load more to keep the feed chronological without feeling like page numbers.
Who made this
I'm a sound designer and composer working across art installations, video games, and various other fields. For a while I had the idea of building a feed for tiny sounds — something playful and clearly made for people who work with sound, find sounds, or are genuinely fascinated by the sonic texture of everyday life. Tonk! is that idea.
My wish is for Tonk! to become a small archive of special short sounds: sounds that are specific, strange, beautiful, useful, funny, fragile, or hard to place. I want there to be room for sounds that were naturally recorded from the world, but also for designed sounds: tiny sonic inventions, imaginary objects, and thoughts about how another world might sound. For me, both belong here. A captured radiator click and a carefully built alien door can sit in the same archive, as long as they stay short, intentional, and full of character.
I vibe-coded the entire app using Claude, Codex, and v0. I have some programming experience, mostly from game audio work, but I am not a software developer by trade.
Tonk! is a side project. I am developing it as a hobby. That means I will not always respond quickly to emails or suggestions - sometimes not at all for a while. But I would genuinely love for a small community to grow around it, and I will try to implement suggestions that feel right and make sense for what the app is trying to be.
If you enjoy Tonk! and want to support hosting costs, you can buy me a coffee.
Support Tonk!- Schwupp